The Dreams

Chapter Thirty Seven

Using the awareness techniques taught to her by Dr. Charlotte, Rina started to reclaim her nightly sleep. That part was absolutely wonderful. She felt rested again, which allowed her to feel like a human being when she woke up in the morning.

She just did not understand why she could not remember the rest of her past life. It was perfectly fine and apparently extremely common for people to go about their lives without knowing anything about their past lives. Rina knew she had been reincarnated and because of that, she could not understand why she did not remember more. She had all of the information that came about from the dreams she had so far, but even now that she was consciously aware of Yuzuki, the information about the rest of her previous life was not forthcoming.

She tried not to focus on it. She did not want to go digging around only to end up hurting herself. Everything seemed to be going so well now and she did not want to let anything, including her own curiosity, mess it up. She tried to encourage herself to be more patient. She was still remembering things. It just was coming at the same pace as before. She had expected a flood of knowledge once she knew the truth, but that did not happen and it did not seem likely to happen now that a few more days had passed.

Knowing that Yuzuki would die one day in these memories made her feel particularly strange. It was like she had flipped to the end of the book and read the last page and now she was back to reading the middle and desperately looking for hints of what she knew was going to come.

She was afraid. She had answers now. She had a plan. It should have been enough to keep her from being panicking. Any other time it would have been enough. With dreams and memories still coming back to her though she could not help but feel apprehension for what would inevitably come to pass. One day she was going to dream about her death, and she did not know what would happen to her when that time came.

So many things had already happened in her dream memories. Many of those things threatened to her with severe psychological harm, but none of them were as bad as actually experiencing death in the first person.

The more she thought about it the more afraid she became. People were not designed to survive experiencing death. Near death experiences were one thing, but to have been reincarnated Yuzuki must have actually died. Since she was in some sense that still made her a bit dizzy to think about for too long actually Yuzuki, she found herself starting to be very afraid that remembering her death would kill her.

She knew living and dying did not work that way, but reincarnation was not supposed to work this way either. Normal rules did not seem to apply to her situation anymore. The more she learned the more dangerous things seemed to become.

A few months ago she was just too tired. Then she was suffering from some sort of mystery illness that was not explainable by modern medicine. Then it became a matter of her soul affecting her mind. A quick realignment of her energies was little more than slapping a bandage over a slashed artery. It briefly slowed down the problem, but when it came back it was worse than ever. Finally, she did get the answers she sought and she was taught a way to manage the situation. Now she was worried about a problem that was purely hypothetical.

It was possible that nothing would happen at all. She might dream her way through Yuzuki's entire life, reach her death and get up the next day and just be done with it all forever. She might not even reach Yuzuki's death before dying herself.

She had done more than a bit of research on kitsune, and everything pointed to them living for a very, very long time. Even though she seemed to be processing Yuzuki's life at a rate of far more than one day at a time, there was a chance she would still be remembering her past life sixty years from now. Yuzuki could have lived for hundred or thousands of years. There was no way to tell at this point. It was not as though Rina could just ask her.